POST: 'Seen/by Everyone' - I've become nonchalant about death

What's it about?

The world couldn’t give less shits about the humans that inhabit it. Amongst all the chaos that has been happening in the US alone this past week, I’ve come to the morbid conclusion that the world I live in is absolutely ruthless. Watching this show a week before the terror that hit Orlando, almost prepared me to cope with the all the death that came.

What'd I experience?

The layout of the show is pretty clear from the start. Most of the dialogue is being taken from real online interactions -‘found text’. Having everything come from ‘raw materials’ made me think of those terrible horror movies that try really hard to be ‘real’, but fall flat on their face (cough *UNFRIENDED* cough). So, I was expecting some confusing story line that then would mesh into someone else's life and then I’d be confused as all hell. But even though I found myself in some of those moments, it ended up adding a lot to everyone’s story, since most people who experience life also get the pleasure of dealing with it’s hot messness.

One of the things I noticed, which made me kind of lose hope in myself as a decent human, is the fact that I don’t remember any character names. I pretty much identify them purely by their respective tragedies. Meaning I recall each person solely based on the worst moment of their life. Go me!

What was eye opening for me, is the fact that I have become really nonchalant about the deaths that happened around me. Not that it happens much (5 times so far, shit- is that a lot?), but I found myself speaking to my mum about an acquaintance of ours who was pretty savagely murdered and I felt like I was talking about a character that was killed off on a TV series. My mum had found out through Facebook and pretty much all the details about his death were on Facebook. More so, the family of the man was so open about his death that my mum was able to get a picture of the man as he was left by his killer. Blood spatter and all.

I assumed when I saw it that I wasn’t gonna be disturbed, because I’ve seen my fair share of serial killer-cannibal documentaries and they aren’t shy about showing dead bodies, but this was someone we knew so I assumed it would at least be sort of disturbing. But, nothing. Nada. I’ve come to the conclusion that finding out about murder, death, and tragedy via facebook -online in general- dilutes the severity of these moments for me or I’m a complete sociopath (I’m kidding...I hope).

I still don’t know if it's the fact it is a legitimate physical barrier between the dead or if it’s the ability to keep scrolling down. It’s pretty fu*ked to say, but it’s pretty much what we end up doing in real life anyway, we just eventually move on. One of the character actually summarized the world’s perspective on death by saying, ‘..the World is a dick.’ And so we are, because in order to continue on with life we do try and move passed those people we lose along the way.

It’s so interesting that before seeing this play I hadn’t noticed how selfish people can be when mourning, the funeral is really for the attendants not the person in the coffin. It’s a shot at getting to show off what a great human I am while making the dead person seem like they were nearly the most pure and perfect person on earth. I don't ever hear people talk about the shitty side of the dead person, I mean really? What are they gonna do pull a Jesus just to come back and tell Jessica she’s a bitch for never telling her how bad her haircut really was? It’s not wanting to talk shit about a dead person because that would make anyone look like a dick.

But then look at the world - as it’s own entity - and it’s the realest MC out there. It couldn’t care less about the puny humans that live on it. It doesn’t mourn, it just takes in whatever new organism is born onto it and moves the fuck on. In the big scheme of the things, as my mum has eloquently put it, “We are all the same piece of sh*t”, none of us are more special. We all die and decompose (unless you’re eaten) in the same way, people will all eventually stop thinking about the dead person as often and continue living in the same world that person died in.